Everybody is screaming for “strong government”. The only
salvation is in a dictatorship, in “iron discipline”, in
silencing and reducing to obedience all the refractory members
of the Right and Left. We know whom they wish to
silence. The Rights are making no noise, they are
working. Some of them in the government, others at the
factories, all of them with threats of lockouts, orders for the
disbanding of regiments, and the threat of penal servitude. The
Konovalovs and the Tereshchenkos, with the help of the Kerenskys
and the Skobelevs, are working in an organised manner
for their own good. And they don’t have to be silenced.

Pravda is barred from the front. The Kiev “agents” have
decided not to distribute Pravda. The Zemstvo Union is
not selling Pravda in its newspaper stands. And now we
are promised a “systematic fight against the preaching of
Leninism” (Izvestia). On the other hand, every
spontaneous protest, every excess, wherever it comes from, is
blamed on us.

Unable as they are to get clear guidelines, aware instinctively
how false and unsatisfactory is the position of the official
leaders of democracy, the masses are compelled to grope a
way out for themselves.

The result is that every dissatisfied, class-conscious
revolutionary, every angered fighter who yearns for his village
home and sees no end to the war, and sometimes simply men
who
are out to save their own skins, rally to the banner of
Bolshevism.

Where Bolshevism has a chance to air its views openly, there we
find no disorganisation.

Where there are no Bolsheviks or where they are not allowed to
speak, there we find excesses, demoralisation, and
pseudo-Bolsheviks.

They need a pretext for saying: “The Bolsheviks are
demoralising the army” and then shutting the Bolsheviks’
mouths.

To dispose once for all of “enemy” slander and the ridiculous
distortions of Bolshevism, we quote the concluding part of a
leaflet distributed in the army by one of our delegates on the
eve of the All-Russia Congress.

“This does not mean that we must immediately overthrow the
present government or disobey it. So long as the majority of the
peoples support it and believe that five socialists can cope
with all the rest, we cannot afford to fritter away our forces
in desultory uprisings.

“Husband your strength! Get together at meetings! Pass
resolutions! Demand that all power be handed over to the Soviet
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! Convince those who disagree
with us! Send your resolution to me at the Congress in Petrograd
in the name of your regiment, so that I can quote your voice
there!

“But beware of those who, posing as Bolsheviks, will try to
provoke you to riots and disturbances as a screen for their own
cowardice! Know that though they are with you now, they will
sell you out to the old regime at the first hint of danger.

“The real Bolsheviks call you to conscious revolutionary
struggle, and not to riots.

“Comrades! The All-Russia Congress will elect representatives,
to whom, pending the convocation of the Constituent Assembly,
the Provisional Government will be accountable.

“First,thatall power be handed over to the Soviet of
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

“Second, that a proposal for peace without annexations or
indemnities be made Immediately in the name of our people
to the peoples and governments of all the belligerent
nations, both our Allies and our enemies. If any government
tries to turn it down it will be overthrown by its
own people.

“Third, that the money which people have made out of the war
should be converted to state needs by wag of confiscation of
the capitalists’ war profits.

“Comrades! Only by the transfer of power to the democracy in
Russia, Germany, and France, only by the overthrow of the
bourgeois governments in all countries, can the war be ended.

“Our revolution lies started this, and it is our task now to
give a further impetus to the world revolution by having a fully
authorised popular Russian government make an order of peace to
all the governments of Europe and by strengthening our alliance
with the revolutionary democrats of Western Europe.

“Woe betide the bourgeois government that will persist in
continuing the war after this.

“Together with Its people we shall make revolutionary war
upon that government.

“It is to say all this to our government In Petrograd in your
name that I have been elected to the Congress in Petrograd.

“Member of the Army Committee of the 11th Army, Delegate of the
Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party
(Bolsheviks) to the Congress of the South-Western Front, Ensign
Krylenko.”

No one who has taken the trouble to read our Party’s resolutions
can fail to see that the gist of them has been
correctly expressed by Comrade Krylenko.

The Bolsheviks are calling the proletariat, the poor peasants
and all the toiling and exploited people to a conscious
revolutionary struggle, and not to riots and disturbances.

Only a genuine government of the people, a government belonging
to the majority of the nation, is capable of following
the right path leading mankind to the overthrow of the
capitalist yoke, to deliverance from the horrors and misery of
the imperialist war, and to a just and lasting peace.